Maple Sugaring Frozen Out!

My husband completed construction on our new sugaring stove. It works great! He is so talented, I just love him. We have collected a total of 39 gallons of sap. We boiled most of that on Saturday, and have it concentrated down to about 3 gallons. When I finish boiling this down, I should get just under a gallon of syrup. But now, we are back the Michigan deep freeze of late winter, and no new sap has flowed for several days. It is 7 degrees outside right now. Brr. The trees need sunny daytime temperatures of close to 40 degrees, and nighttime temperatures in the high 20's to make good sap flow. Once it warms up enough so it stops freezing at night, the trees start to make their leaves. Syrup made from budding sap tastes bitter, so once it is consistently above freezing at night, that is the end of the sugaring season. I'll post a picture of the set up we have the next time we fire it up. Collecting and cutting up the wood to burn in the stove is the hardest and most time consuming part of the whole process. We have lots of fuel wood in our woodlot, but getting it from where it lies to where we need it to be is a lot of work.

Moving the Kiln next week!

Just got word that the work crew will move the kiln from old building to new building next Tuesday...Exciting and scary at the same time! I'll go over there and take some pictures of the new space. In other news, we have a fairly intense storm going on here. This is the view out my front door. Like I say, we live in the woods. The driveway goes off to the east and finds the road about a third of a mile away....